But I really tried to follow directions for my garden this time! But I didn’t read my seeds’ instructions until after I had planted them and was in the process of transferring them.

Apparently, the plants I got aren’t really meant for planters because they need ~1-3 feet worth of spacing between plants! My city planter itself is only 2′ by 3′-ish. Oops. I guess this is why a lot of people I know talk about growing radishes (2 inches apart) or herbs.

So I only transferred my jalapenos (in addition to my last radish plant). The jalapenos “only” need ~1 foot of space between them. So I arranged them in a triangle, giving them ~10 inches of space between each other… and well, there’s some space between them and the radishes (but not much). I’m going to try to plant the cherry tomatos plants in the topsy turvy and try to get another planter for the heirloom tomatos.

2 of the radish seedlings were apparently on steroids (I got the seeds organic from Whole Foods!) and were like 5 inches taller than everything else and flopping all over the place. So I decided to open up the planter and transfer those 2 plants. I read on an online article (that I can’t seem to find the link to anymore) that the first 2 leave a plant produces are the dicot leaves so to wait until there are a few more leaves growing before moving the plants. Well, my radishes had like 4 leaves each and were no longer standing up so I figured let’s give it a try! I hope I don’t end up killing them.

I decided not to move the whole city planter box outside just yet since I was afraid that my radish seedlings weren’t really ready. So I kept it inside right next to my door so they could get sunlight. The bad part about this is that the city planter’s “irrigation system” works by telling you to fill, through the stand-up tube, water that goes to the bottom of the planter until water starts to drip out the side overflow holes. So I cut 2 plastic cups to catch this water to avoid damaging my floors. Only to find that the whole box itself leaks on one side! I ended up using a slightly deep plate to catch the excess water. I’m not sure how this planter will work then since it leaks. We’ll see.

Even still, I ran into some problems, essentially losing most of Friday to the upgrade and then spending time to fix my environment.

The first problem? Xcode not truly being installed after upgrade. It wouldn’t be a big deal if they gave you some sort of warning to say your Xcode is out of date and is no longer working. But I didn’t get any such warning. Instead, it was only when I was attempting to build a gem, that the system couldn’t find a C compiler. I kept checking and even opened Xcode on my machine. And it really did appear to be installed. Except it wasn’t. I had to upgrade to the latest version of Xcode to finally build the gem.

My second complaint – the new Resume feature applied to the Terminal. In some cases, the Resume feature is pretty awesome. Everything pops up as if you never closed it. But with the Terminal, this is not as good as not everything is being re-initialized. For example, rvm doesn’t doesn’t actually get loaded when Resume plops you back into the Terminal window. It’s so misleading because usually once you enter the directory, it loads whichever RVM the .rvmrc file says. But not when Resume opens that window for you!

To disable this feature: go into Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Restart twice and you should be good to go.

Update:
Well that’s weird. I came on and turned on my desktop… and Terminal still has the Resume option saved on this machine. BUT rvm loaded properly! Go figure. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ll give this Resume feature more of a chance on this machine for now.

I stumbled upon Blue Lounge’s Cable Box. This was not the first time I’d seen it (I think I saw it on sale on Fab at one point), but this time I saw the minis which included this very pretty blue. I think had there been a larger size in blue, I would’ve sprung for the $30 this box costs… But seeing how simple the idea was, I was jealous that I hadn’t thought of it myself. So I decided to make it myself! My main concern was that I had a Belkin 12-outlet surge protector that I thought was wider than the standard surge protector and large block adapters that I wanted to hide in the box, taking away any extra space I might have. And really, it’s just a box! Does it really cost $30!?

So I started wandering around the Container Store looking for boxes I could use. I decided to use the Container Store’s men’s shoe box (on sale right now!). It’s a transparent box so it’ll never look as nice as the Blue Lounge box, but no one’s going to be looking that carefully under my desk! I also purchased a cable winder disc and some velcro cable ties.

First problem: my concerns about the size of the surge protector were spot on… except I got the dimension to worry about wrong… the length of the surge protector was the problem. It probably could’ve fit, wedged in… if it didn’t have the extra coax plugs that I don’t even use! So the first modification was to flip the box upside down since the sides of the box slowly widen towards the lid.

Armed with only a swiss army knife and a steak knife, I began slowly sawing my way through the box. The plastic proved to be sturdier than I anticipated. I ended up scoring (not well either) the rectangle cutout and using the serrated blade on the swiss army knife to actually cut. Lots of plastic shavings accumulated over my desk and floor… but I finally managed to cut the rectangle! So then the 2nd modification to the box occurred… I decided one opening was sufficient. I wasn’t going to bother trying to make a 2nd hole!

It took me about 5 minutes to get all the plugs I wanted in the box. Yes, success! I thought… except there was still a slew of cables coming out of the box. So I started using the cable winder and cable ties I bought. Also, I moved all the old Kaplan SAT tutoring material I had right next to the outlet to allow more space. Nearly 2 hours later… I was done!

Here’s the before and after results!

Final conclusions:

• The box is nice and all… but it’s still the cable winder and cable ties that help the most. I’m glad I only spent $3.41 for the box vs. $25-30 for the Blue Lounge Cable Box.
• The #2 most impactful change? Moving the old Kaplan SAT material away from the plug. Duh! So simple, yet never did it.
• No amount of cable management systems will solve the problem of cables still going to various locations. The area above the cable winder starts to get messy again… with cables splitting off to go to the speakers, the monitor, my external hard drive, and the actual computer. Is there some clever solution to this problem?
• Never start a project without the proper supplies. A swiss army knife and a steak knife aren’t very good at cutting plastic…

After the first project, I learned the importance of having a central repository for code. We worked nearly a year, but I never really got to see my code interact with the other people’s code. It was difficult to feel like progress was being made since we were so isolated from each other. Plus, who knows what worms were festering, ready to pop up when we started to integrate our code. So after that project, I’ve been insisting that we set up subversion or something as one of the first setup steps. Collaboration is soooo much easier when well… more than one person is involved!

For the latest project, my friend and I wanted to use git, but didn’t want to pay for private repos on github. So he told me about git bundle. It’s a way to send bundles of commits to one another. It seems a step back in the “central repository for code” idea that I was insisting on earlier, but actually isn’t that bad! Rather than pull from another repo, I’m essentially “pulling” from his bundle file and merging it into my code and committing it into my local repo. Considering our limitation with git (not having a private central repo), this solution seems to be a pretty good alternative! We’ve only just started so we’ll see how confusing this may become…

Do kids these days still dream about being astronauts? I remember seeing some launches of space shuttles in early elementary school, but later on, they just stopped broadcasting them (possibly after Challenger). I think launches now will get even less press coverage.

I posted on my old blog when it was first decided space travel was going private. I’m only half joking when I say that I want to cheer for the Americans vs those Ruskies. But I do think the patriotism of space travel did add to its appeal. I mean, it all started from Kennedy’s speech about beating the Russians! I really think space travel lost some of its popularity after the Cold War… who we going to beat now? Americans like to kick ass!!

I also wonder how the privatization of space travel will work if disasters occur. Space travel is not without risk… would a private company be willing to take that risk? I feel like they’d be terrified of the lawsuits and payouts they’d have to make if something were to occur that would make them “overly” pre-cautious (overly is in quotes because you can never be too cautious when human life is at stake, but you know what i mean). I think a trait I really admire in military service members (astronauts included!) is their willingness to make sacrifices that the rest of us don’t do on a daily basis. When I think of my (desk) job, am I willing to die for my job? No… most likely not. I guess there are private jobs in which people are willing to risk their lives for… maybe it’s just me!!

The radishes were the first to take off (Day 3 only had radishes), but slowly my tomatos started to come in over the weekend (5-6 days after I planted them). But nothing in my jalapeno pods yet. I feel like I got a dud pack of seeds! I read online that they are slow, anywhere from 7-24 days. I hope not 24!

I think this weekend, I will be ready to transfer the radishes. I’m not sure whether I should’ve already… the stems are already 3+ inches! I think I was hoping to transplant them all at the same time, but looks like that won’t be happening!

Hopefully the rest of them begin to pop up! I was a little worried that I dug a little too deep before putting the seeds in. I’m not very good at estimating depth and was too lazy to fish out a ruler…

My coworker was potting some herbs in the office today and I talked to her about my home garden experiment. She suggested I read Square Foot Gardening… I might try to borrow it from the library!

On Sunday, I decided to go to Home Depot to get a planter for my deck and some soil for my topsy turvy (something I bought like 2 years ago, inspired by my friend Clara and her gardening adventures). This trip ended up being more than a hour as I wandered around the garden center. At first, the nice man helping me showed me various planter options, but recommended I build my own garden box (similar to this one), even after I told him this would be on a concrete patio or wooden deck. So I went and got a 2x8x10 cut to form a 2×3 box. Then I ran into the nice man again in the garden center (picking up soil) and he had found what he had wanted to show me all along… a garden kit for city folk! They were really cool and took back my cut wood (apparently you can buy cut wood from Home Depot!). I also picked up this Jiffy Windowsill Greenhouse which apparently will allow me to grow plants from seeds. Good thing they told me this as I was about to literally drop my seeds into the soil in my planter. Oh, and I got more seeds… this time for cherry tomatos!

Today, I planted my seeds! (For my own memory, I planted from left to right: cherry tomatos, big tomatos, radishes, and jalapenos.)

Supposedly in about 7-10 days (I’m not sure… only the burpees tomatos said how long the seedlings would take to form!), I should have mini-plants that will be ready to be transferred to the city picker planter!

We’ll see…

On Friday, I biked into work. By “biked”, I mean I drove half the way to work (~5 miles), parked my car at a park by the bike path into the office, and biked the remaining ~4 miles into the office. It was my first bike ride of the year and I’m terribly out of shape! The same bike ride last year took me about 20 minutes, but took over half a hour on Friday! Granted I had some bike chain issues… but still… I was exhausted!

Oh yeah.. and I forgot to mention my bike has a pedal assisted motor. Hey, don’t judge… there are some steep hills on my ride to work!!

On Saturday, I went on the W&OD trail from mile 8.5 to 11.5 with a friend. The W&OD is a pretty awesome trail- nice and wide, smooth pavement, fairly flat with benches along the way to take breaks. At mile 11.5, it pops up right next to a Whole Foods! So our plan was to bike to the Whole Foods area, explore Vienna, maybe find a ice cream shop, and bike back.

What we found instead was the Whole Foods has a bar (a bar!) inside of it! And that bar was offering a beer sampler. So we stopped for a little drink and corn nuts…